San Diego, CA (special) -- Detectives have a saying in criminal investigations: "follow the 
money." But this inquiry deals with how love developed between two Jewish communities widely 
separated in time and in place. The key to this investigation is to "follow the Torah." 

We begin our tale in 1983, shortly after a new Conservative Congregation Beth Am was 
established in a former tire store in Solana Beach, California. 

Rabbi Wayne Dosick, who was the the congregation's spiritual leader, learned that Westminster 
Synagogue in England had approved Beth Am's application to receive one of the Holocaust 
Torahs held in trust for the Jewish people. 

Following the defeat of nazi Germany in World War II, Westminster Synagogue became the custodian of 1,564 Torahs which had been looted from the synagogues of central Europe. These precious legacies had been stored in Prague with the intention of some day creating a museum to an extinct people -- an exhibit the nazis had hoped would justify the genocide they committed against the Jews.  After Czechoslovakia was reestablished as an independent country, agreement was reached for the Torahs -- all carefully numbered by the nazi looters -- to be turned over to Westminster Synagogue and from there to be returned, one by one, into the active service of the Jewish people.  Congregation Beth Am was not the first synagogue in San Diego

Holocaust Torah

County to obtain a Holocaust Torah, nor would it be the last. But no where to date has a Holocaust Torah weaved a more wondrous spell than it did with this congregation. 

There were certain fees and shipping costs associated with transporting this Holocaust Torah 
from the Westminster Synagogue to the United States. Dosick, today leader of the Elijah Minyan
in Carlsbad and a successful author of numerous Jewish-themed books, recalled that the total 
was somewhere between $1,500 and $2,000, money that simply was not within the new 
congregation's budget. 

"I called up a person immediately whom I knew bringing a Holocaust Torah would mean the 
most to -- Lynn Schenk -- because of her parents (Sidney and Elsa Schenk) being survivors," 
Dosick recalled. "I told her the story and there was a check on my desk the next day." 

At the time, Schenk was working as an attorney. She later gained civic recognition as a 
commissioner for the San Diego Unified Port District, and later as a Democratic member of 
Congress. Today she serves as the chief of staff for California Gov. Gray Davis. Both she and 
her brother, attorney Fred Schenk, along with their families, belong to Congregation Beth Am. 

At dedication ceremonies on Sunday, June 13, for Congregation Beth Am's new synagogue complex in the Carmel Valley section of San Diego, Schenk told a large audience that when  Rabbi Dosick asked her and her husband, Hugh Friedman, to make the special donation, the,  rabbi in fact, had conferred upon them "a rare privilege."  "Our Torah in many ways became the foundation of all that was to come," she said. "It organized

Schenk Family

us as a congregation and became the symbolic link to our collective roots." 

Dosick recalled that when the Torah arrived at the U.S. Customs facility at San Diego's 
Lindbergh Field, "it came in a long, narrow box, and there I was. I had more hair and more 
beard in those days, and the guy thought- I'm sure--that we must have been trying to smuggle 
drugs or something, because he made me open the entire box, then the entire Torah and roll it 
out, so he could see indeed that it was a sacred scroll." 

While giving the Torah such a close inspection, Dosick noticed the number 747 on it. Being at an 
airport, one might have associated this number with Boeing-747s, the large jumbo aircraft. But 
this was the nazi catalogue number. And there was a bittersweet irony to that number- 747. For 
if you add the three integers, 7, 4, and 7, they total 18 -- the number associated with the Hebrew 
word, chai, meaning "life." 

(Before the use of Arabic numerals became commonplace around the world, Hebrew speakers used their alphabet as numbers. Alef was 1; Bet was 2, Gimel was 3, and so forth. One could add the value of each letter to obtain the value of the word. The word chai is spelled Chet-Yud. 
Chet has the value of 8. Yud has the value of 10.) 

So here was a Torah, once bound for a museum of extinction, now headed for a new life in the 
United States! 

Along with the catalogue number was a notation that the Torah once had been housed in the 
synagogue of Roudnice, Czechoslovakia, a town lying on the River Labem (known in German as 
the River Elbe), about 25 miles north of Prague. 

Roudnice is pronounced Rude-Nietzsche, which is a coincidental, but perhaps apt, description of 
the philosophy of German philosopher Frederic Nietzshe, who believed power was the chief 
motivating force of societies and people. 

After returning from the airport, Dosick went to his Encyclopaedia Judaica to learn more about Roudnice. It reported that "23 Jewish families were known to have lived there in 1570, but community must have existed there before." The entry went on to say that the original homes and cemetery were abandoned to make room for a monastery, and that in 1631, the Jewish community (which had moved elsewhere in the town) "saved the town from destruction by the Saxons by paying a large sum of money." 

There was a massacre of some Jews in Roudnice in 1744, at the same time that Jews were 
expelled from Prague. A new synagogue was built in 1853, and another cemetery established in 
1896. In 1930, the community numbered about 136 Jews or about 1.7 percent of the 
population. 

Then the entry in the Encyclopaedia Judaica reported: "When the community was liquidated by 
the nazis in 1942, its synagogue equipment was sent to the central Jewish Museum in Prague. No 
congregation was reestablished after World War II. Richard Feder served as rabbi of Roudnice." 

So, the Torah had been out of service since 1942, and now in 1983 it was coming back. Like 
Moses and the Israelites, it had been in the desert for some 40 years! 

The Encyclopaedia Judaica also sketched the life of Rabbi Feder, who was born in 1875 and 
who was graduated from a rabbinical seminary in Vienna. Feder was an author. In 1919, he 
wrote a book Jews and Christians, and in 1923, he developed a textbook on the Hebrew 
language. 

He was based in the town of Kojetin, but also conducted regular services in the nearby villages 
of Roudnice, Kolin, and Louny, before nazis arrested him and sent him to the concentration camp 
at Theresienstadt, where he continued to serve as a rabbi. He survived the war and eventually 
resettled in Brno, where he was designated as chief rabbi of the Czech province of Moravia. In 
1961, he added to his portfolio service as the chief rabbi of the province of Bohemia, in which 
Roudnice is located. 

Feder went on to write in 1947 Jewish Tragedy, one of the first books published on the 
Holocaust. He several times updated Jewish Tales, a collection of stories for children. In 1955 
he published Jews and Judaism, and in 1955 wrote Sinai, a textbook of religious instruction. In 
1965, the communist government of Czechoslovakia gave Feder a medal for his "uncompromising stand in the fight against fascism" and for his efforts in behalf of peace. The rabbi died in 1970 at the age of 95 -- a full life. 

Dosick designed a mantle to dress the Torah in --one which is hauntingly beautiful in its 
starkness. The mantle, still used today, is of pure black with a yellow cloth star -- similar to the 
stars that the nazis had forced their Jewish victims to wear as identification on their clothing. 

On Yom Kippur Day, 1983, the Torah ceremonially was brought under a chuppah into the 
synagogue, in what Lynn Schenk later would describe as an "electrifying High Holy Day service." 

"There under the chuppah: one survivor, my father, clutching another survivor, our Torah," 
Schenk recalled, as the emotion crept back in her voice. "It was a moment that I don't think 
anyone will ever forget who had the privilege of sharing that. Each person who was gripped with 
emotion, young or old, we thought our own thoughts of family, of heritage, of six million lost." 

Dosick recalled that Schenk told him following that High Holy Day procession "that while we 
were standing there waiting to come in, her father told her for the first time in her life that his job 
in the camps was to make the yellow star. " The mantle had triggered his memory, "so for the first 
time in her whole life, she learned from her father that had been his job in the concentration 
camp." 

After the service, Dosick remembered, he was approached by congregant Nellie Katsell, who 
told of being born to survivors after liberation and living in Czechoslovakia. Rabbi Feder travelled 
throughout Czechoslovakia after the war and often had stayed with her parents when he visited 
their community, she told the rabbi. So, here was a connection: "Not only did we have a picture 
of the man (Feder) who had read from the Torah, we had a live witness to his life and work," 
Dosick exulted. 

After the ceremony Dosick decided that the Torah should not simply be put into a ceremonial case in the synagogue, nor its use limited to special occasions like the annual Yom HaShoah  observance.  Halacha, or Jewish law, dictates that every word of the Torah be perfectly legible, and that the scroll be repaired of all blemishes, because the Torah is the word of God. Only a perfect copy of the Torah is considered eligible for reading. Damaged Torahs either are buried like a human being, or kept for exhibits.  "That it could be a living memorial and not a museum piece, I had to make a really serious halachic decision," Dosick said. "The Torah was nowhere near a kosher Torah, and it would  have taken many thousands of dollars, probably $10,000 - $15,000, to make it kosher again.Even then, a sofer who

Rabbi Wayne Dosick

looked at it wasn't quite sure it could be done without harming it. 

"I had to make a decision that I thought God would rather have the bar/ bat mitzvah child read 
from a not-quite-kosher Torah, but make it a living memorial," Dosick said. 

"I have written more than once that we Jews are good at saying kaddish , but not so good at 
saying hallel -- that we are good at crying but not so good at rejoicing," the rabbi-author said. "I 
wanted us to have both messages: 'We do not forget those children who didn't live to stand at the 
Torah' and at the same time 'We celebrate that a new generation of Jewish children is standing at
the Torah and is celebrating bar/bat mitzvah and is triumphing over evil and serving God.'" 

And so, Dosick began Congregation Beth Am's tradition of having every bar/ bat mitzvah child 
read at the ceremony from the Holocaust Torah. "I always said that they not only came to the 
Torah for themselves but also for one of the little children of Roudnice who would have liked to 
have come to Torah for his bar mitzvah but whose life ended instead in a puff of smoke from a 
crematorium chimney." 

He repeated that lesson week after week, year after year, until he left Congregation Beth Am in 
1991, and "after a certain time the kids began to tease me about it, as they will, because if you 
hear something 30 times a year, sometimes it becomes a parody of itself," Dosick said. 

Nevertheless, the message had staying power. One example was when "one of the families from 
the shul went back to Illinois and asked me a few years later to officiate there at their kid's bar 
mitzvah, and even though they did not have a Holocaust Torah, they asked me to tell that story." 

* * * 

Other congregants who remembered the story were Carol Davidson Baird, who in 1989 was 
president of the San Diego Jewish Genealogical Society; her husband Dr. Stephen Baird, their 
children Daniel and Geoffrey Baird, and her parents, Ernest and Eva Davidson, who were 
Holocaust survivors. 

The Bairds and Davidsons decided to go on a genealogical trip to trace their roots-- a trip which 
took them to the Davidsons' native Germany and also to Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary.

After the families arrived in two rental cars in Czechoslovakia, they had intended to spend a day 
sightseeing in Prague, but political unrest there- associated with protests against the state during 
the dusk of the Communist system--persuaded them to head instead for the Theresienstadt 
Concentration Camp, also known in the Czech language as Terezin. 

"Wayne Dosick was always talking about the Torah in human terms, so we decided to go see the 
town where it came from" en route to Theresienstadt, Carol Baird recalled. 

Using her training as a genealogist, Baird suggested to her German speaking mother that they 
stop in the center of Roudnice and "find the oldest person, who probably would speak German, 
and ask where the synagogue was. 

"So we did that," Baird related. "Mom talked to this old lady in German, who gave her very 
interesting directions, which we followed up the street, and there was nothing there, just a vacant 
lot. I figured maybe that was where the synagogue was destroyed. Across the street my husband 
said to 'look at that building; it is now a school but it sure looks like all the other synagogues that 
we have seen in Europe.' So we took pictures of it as well." 

Not being certain that was the synagogue, the family kept walking down the street and eventually 
came to a police station. These were the Communist times and officialdom was none to friendly 
to Americans. "But we went into the police station and asked two of the policemen if they knew 
where the synagogue was. They just laughed, really snidely, at us, and said 'Synagogue Kaput!' 
We left thinking we were very lucky to be able to leave." 

Nevertheless, the family continued to walk around the town, and just as they were ready to 
leave, they saw a woman admiring one of their German rental cars. They asked her about the 
synagogue, and she replied that although she didn't know where it was, perhaps some of the
ladies in the nearby beauty parlor might She went in and conferred and "all of a sudden a gaggle 
of old women came out, all talking and pointing in different directions where the old synagogue 
was us," Baird said. 

The lady reported what the consensus was, and then offered to accompany the American 
strangers to the site. She gave her purse to her husband before climbing into the car with the 
Davidsons, who drove in front as the Bairds followed. They drove out of town and stopped 
momentarily at a Catholic cemetery where men were seated on a bench surrounding a tree. The 
woman got out to confer with the men, while the Davidsons and the Bairds, misunderstanding 
what was happening, started to explain that they were looking for a Jewish cemetery, not a 
Catholic one. The woman said she understood but just wanted to ascertain the directions. The 
men told her to follow the dirt road. 

"We continue further until the road ends and there is no place to go," Baird related. "On one side 
is an open field, on the left side is an enormous forest. We all get out of the car and she points to 
go through the forest. There is a broken wall. We climb over that.... 

"We ducked under the branch of a tree and it was the most extraordinary sensation. We all got 
goose bumps. There was a building with a big Jewish star, which we thought was the destroyed 
synagogue. We went out and started tracing (putting a piece of paper over inscriptions, and 
penciling over the paper to copy the impression)." 

	Meanwhile the Bairds' two sons started exploring the dome roof that had fallen into the center of the burned structure. "Geoffrey found a burnt timber from the roof, and Danny found a block from the wall itself where the stucco had come off," Carol Baird said. "We kept that, and I started taking pictures of the other buildings--the attached buildings that had Hebrew writing on the walls."
Roudnice Ceremonial Hall  {photo by Carol Davidson Baird}

After returning to the United States, the Bairds learned through research that the building that 
they thought had been the synagogue in actuality was a ceremonial building located adjacent to a 
Jewish cemetery on the outskirts of town. The inscriptions were psalms said for the dead. In this 
building, bodies had been watched and washed before burial. 

The Davidsons and Bairds reunited the lady with her husband (and her purse), and "drove out of 
town feeling very satisfied that we had accomplished our mission," Baird said. "That was an 
incredibly friendly and wonderful thing for her to do." 

The next adventure was getting the pieces of wood and stone from Czechoslovakia to the United 
States. There was the chance unfriendly Czech authorities might consider the wood and stone to 
be valuable historic items--rather than simply sentimental ones--and accuse the Americans of 
attempting to steal treasures. Son Geoffrey wrapped the souvenirs in his dirty laundry and put 
them in the bottom of the suitcase. "When we left Czechoslovakia, they did search a lot of stuff 
but they didn't bother with that," Baird said. 

Upon return to the United States, Baird had her photograph of the ceremonial building printed 
and framed. She presented it to the synagogue, along with the wood and stone, which Dosick 
had mounted in a shadow box. The photograph and the shadow box were dedicated on Yom 
Kippur of 1989, and given a place on the wall alongside the bima of the shul in Solana Beach. 

The congregation hired its present spiritual leader, Rabbi Arthur Zuckerman, in 1992, a year in which he recalled there were eight b'nai mitzvah students who read from the Holocaust Torah.  The congregation has grown so dramatically that 55 b'nai mitzvah students will read from it this year, "and next year, God willing, 70 students will be bar and bat mitzvah and they each will have a chance to read from it," Zuckerman said.  The congregation's current president, Candice Fagan, quoted Baird at the recent dedication ceremonies: "Torahs are not just pieces of parchment wrapped in velvet. Aside from the words  that they contain, they have a history and a story to tell.  "Certainly our Holocaust Torah could tell us of Shabbas mornings in Roudnice when congregants fondly kissed it and

Rabbi Arthur Zuckerman

children read their maftir from it. The Torah could also tell us of vicious abduction by the nazis and its loneliness sitting catalogued in a dark warehouse until the end of World War II ... Our Torah had a life long age. It was lost, and then found, and reborn in our synagogue. We give life to the Torah and it in turn gives us words to live by." 

Fagan noted that the photograph and effects brought back by the Baird and Davidson families 
inspired architect Michael Witkin "to make his own excursion to Roudnice and he came back 
very inspired to create this beautiful synagogue. 

"One of the features of our new home is the Wall of Remembrance," Fagan said. "Our architect 
painstakingly recreated this wall from what he found of what remained of a once flourishing 
Jewish community. When our generation and future generations view this wall, we will be 
reconnected to the past and thrust forward to our responsibility as Jews in the future." 

* * * 

The Wall of Remembrance replicates the facade of the ceremonial house that the Davidsons and 
Bairds found that day in the woods. It still was being designed by Witkin last year when Milos 
Pojar, a former ambassador of the new Czech Republic to Israel, visited San Diego with other 
Eastern Europeans on a study tour sponsored by the American Jewish Committee. Pojar 
(pronounced Po-yar) today is director for education and culture of the Jewish Museum in 
Prague. 

One of the advantages of being a journalist is the occasional ability to help make connections 
between the people that you meet in the course of gathering stories. After sitting in on the AJC 
conference on border problems, I told Pojar about several Holocaust Torahs that were located
in our community, including the one at Congregation Beth Am. I also told him that Congregation 
Beth Am, inspired by the origins of its Torah, had in fact developed an architectural design 
invoking Roudnice. 

A meeting was arranged between Pojar, Rabbi Zuckerman and the architect Witkin at the 
Holiday Inn at Mission Valley, where the AJC conference had been held. 

Witkin told Pojar that after he found the ritual hall he made architectural sketches and also took 
molds of the building. He explained then that the re-creation of the ritual hall's facade would 
provide an entranceway to the new Beth Am complex. Some of the architectural elements of the 
ritual hall, especially its columns, would be repeated in the design of the overall synagogue, which 
would occupy 25,000 square feet. 

The architect also told Pojar that his own son recently had read from the Holocaust Torah for his 
bar mitzvah. "That is really what we are doing, honoring children and connecting us to our past," 
Witkin said. 

Pojar's own father had been forced by the nazis to work in the Prague museum cataloguing 
Jewish ceremonial objects looted from the synagogues. The father specialized in examining and 
classifying textiles, but it is possible he could have come into contact with the very same Torah. 

When Pojar returned to the Czech Republic, he did some research on Roudnice -- research he 
shared with members of Congregation Beth Am during the dedication ceremonies, so that they 
could know more about the original home of their Torah. 

In the 14th Century the town was considered quite important, because it was where the Roman 
Catholic Archbishop Arnost of Pardubice made his headquarters. This archbishop, who had 
responsibility for all of Bohemia, was a close friend of Charles IV, emperor of the Holy Roman 
Empire, which included Bohemia. Charles IV often visited his friend the archbishop in Roudnice. 
Another visitor was the Italian poet Petrarca. 

Jews were "relatively well protected" during Charles IV's time when they were advisors to the 
emperor, Pojar said. But after he died, there was a pogrom in the Prague Ghetto, which may also 
have affected the Jews of Roudnice. 

In the 17th century, he reported, Czech Catholics became rulers of the town and all the farms, 
forests and lands around. The leader of this family, Polyxena of Lobkovic, "ordered Jews to 
remove from their ghetto, from the Jewish quarter and go close to the river, close to the bridge, 
to set up a new ghetto there. On the spot where the (first) Jewish quarter was, and the first 
synagogue and the first cemetery were, everything was demolished." A monastery was built in the 
ghetto's place. 

It was in the new ghetto, founded in 1630-1640, that there were "approximately 15-20 small 
houses around one street, with some yards, where Jews lived until the beginning of the Second 
World War," Pojar reported. "And in this street is located, in fact, the third synagogue which was 
founded in 1822 and which exists, but which is closed, which is empty. In 1952 it was 
transformed into an apartment house and afterwards to a school." Apparently it was the building, 
the Bairds and Davidsons had seen when they first arrived in Roudnice but had not recognized as
a synagogue. 

There are today two Jewish cemeteries in Roudnice. The older one was established when the 
ghetto was moved in the 17th century. Apparently some tombstones had been transferred there 
from the original cemetery because at least one bore the date of 1611, Pojar said. "This cemetery 
was closed in 1890 and now there is a new wall constructed around, and no one can go in, and 
all the tombstones, all the gravestones are intact. ... Only there are a lot of trees and bushes and 
grass; it is almost not possible to see anything there. But nevertheless, it is only a question of 
cleaning it and it would be a nice cemetery." 

The third cemetery--or the second one still existing--was built around 1890, and this is the one 
where the Davidsons and Bairds found the burial hall in ruins and which inspired Witkin's design. 
"The walls around are also in ruins and the same the tombs," said Pojar. "It is very sad. It
happened partially during the nazi time, partially during the Communist time, partially because of 
some vandalism." 

Pojar noted that the Jews of Roudnice, along with 80,000 other Jews from Bohemia, Moravia 
and Silesia, died in the Holocaust. Among the Czech victims was Pojar's grandmother Berta 
Popperova, who was sent first to Theresienstadt and later to Treblinka in Poland, where she was 
murdered. 

In his research, Pojar located the names of 78 Jewish men and women from Roudnice who died 
in various nazi concentration camps, including some whom he memorialized by setting down small 
stones at Treblinka. 

The Treblinka victims from Roudnice were Berta and Gisela Freund, Eleanora Sabat, Salomon 
Schreiber and Oskar Taussig, he said. They too might have read from the Torah or touched it 
with their prayer books. 

* * * 

The Holocaust Torah is now in a new Ark, in a new sanctuary which people reach by walking 
through a courtyard featuring the Roudnice-inspired Wall of Remembrance. 

But much of the story woven around the Holocaust Torah remains to be learned and told. Stan Schwartz, owner of Schwartz Judaica and president of the Jewish Historical Society of San Diego, is researching which of Rabbi Feder's books are still in print. He reported that the libraries at the University of California at Berkeley and the Jewish Theological Seminary of New York each have at least one of Feder's works.  And Alberto Attia, a San Diego sofer to whom the Holocaust Torah recently was taken for inspection and some minor repairs (the major repairs still need to be done), still is pondering an  amazing mystery.  At the same time that he was examining the Holocaust Torah,

Beth Am's Wall of Remembrance

he also was examining another Torah that was owned by Congregation Beth Tefilah, which since then has merged with Adat Ami Synagogue to become Ohr Shalom Synagogue. 

Attia was amazed that the very distinctive handwriting that formed the Hebrew letters of the 
Holocaust Torah seemed to be the same handwriting that also formed the letters of the Torah 
owned now by Ohr Shalom. 

Whereas the Holocaust Torah had come to Congregation Beth Am via Westminster Synagogue, 
the provenance of Ohr Shalom's Torah is unknown. Shelly Berman, a past president of Beth 
Tefilah, believes it may have been purchased from a dealer in New York, but where the dealer 
obtained it is unknown. 

Attia is certain that the two Torahs were written by the same unknown person. "The sofer had a 
very distinct writing style," he said. "You can tell the signature of a sofer by his writing style. Like 
in English, there are no two people who write alike -- even if it is a square block print letter. It 
was very distinct, the way in which he wrote." 

Pojar made two suggestions for continuing the Saga of the Holocaust Torah during his speech at 
the synaogue building's dedication: 

"Jews in Roudnice are unfortunately forgotten, not here but in the Czech Republic," he told the 
congregants. 

Pojar said that the present-day Count Lobkovic is an American citizen, to whom the Czech 
Republic has restored the castle after its confiscation by the nazis and the communists. He 
suggested that Congregation Beth Am in cooperation with Prague's Jewish Museum, the Terezin 
Foundation and Lobkovic help to establish in the castle a museum, with "one or two rooms 
commemorating Jews in Roudnice, keeping their past in the memory and to show the Czech 
population that (Jews) contributed for generations, for centuries, to the grooming of the city, 
crafts, industry, agriculture and so on." 

The Czech visitor also told the congregation that Tana Fiser and Milos Dobias are Czech citizens 
who created a music and poetry program based on poems of children who perished in Terezin. 

The musicians will be bringing their program to the United States in the fall and "you might think 
of inviting them to your congregation," he said. Fiser, who is Jewish, is a close friend of the Czech 
Republic's President Vaclav Havel, he added, while Dobias is a "famous musician and 
composer." 

Former Congresswoman Schenk, who followed Pojar to the podium, commented "thank you for 
bringing to us this wonderful challenge which I am confident that my fellow congregants are going 
to meet." Zuckerman later also endorsed the ideas. 

And so the saga of the Holocaust Torah continues.